The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [63]
If you Google Lance Olsen you will find that he’s kind of a rock star within the tribal sphere we move through. But that isn’t why I love him or why I have his back forever. It’s this: his words make my words more possible. In his language my brain stops blow up and new ideas shoot out. In his books the moment of a kiss on Nietzsche’s lips, or the seconds before a film begins in a theater in the Mall of America, or the instant before a blast that atomizes the very differences between warring hearts makes you forget the beginning, the middle, and the end as you knew it.
And you will find that he is a Fiction Collective Two author and editor. Like me. If you Google FC2, you will find their mission statement: “ FC2 is among the few alternative presses in America devoted to publishing fiction considered by America’s largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu.”
I don’t know about you , but “heterodox” sounds kinda brainy to me. So I will say this. I am a wrecker and maker of wordhouses. Me and my twin have each other’s backs. And we’re coming for your women and children.
Secular Miracle
NOT ALL MIRACLES COME FROM GOD OR LOOKING UP.
To say that what happened to me in the winter of my early thirties was a miracle is puny compared to what transpired. It started so small. In my hands. In that winter, I sent a short story out as a writing sample. The short story was called “The Chronology of Water.” I sent the story four places: to the Admissions Committee for the M FA in writing at Columbia University; to the hiring committee for a tenure track teaching position; to Oregon Literary Arts as a writing sample for a grant; to Poets and Writers as a writing sample for something called the Writer’s Exchange grant.
In the space of one month my mailbox presented me with letters exactly like the ones that had come to my home in Florida when I longed to swim to college. Only this time I was the only one who would read these letters, an adult woman who had put something of her busted up self straight no chaser into the world. They came one at a time -white and geometric and smelling of something like what if.
I was accepted into Columbia University.
I was offered the teaching job.
I was awarded a $3,000 grant for my story.
And I won the Writer’s Exchange prize.
All in the same month.
NOTHING in my life had ever happened to me like that. And most likely never will. Like the sea of my life waters had opened up. Like my wounds had something in them besides hurt.
Me being me, I chose the job over the MFA. This is important - the MFA was what I wanted more than anything. You have no idea. With all my broken little heart. But I couldn’t choose it. I had to survive, is what I chose. I had to take care of myself. No one else would. And so I swallowed the desire to name myself as a writer who would go to Columbia. Like the swimmer who couldn’t go to Columbia, either.
I took the grant money and bought a car. I wanted to go to Paris but I bought a car instead. A reliable car to get to and from work. I didn’t take myself out to dinner, I didn’t buy myself champagne, I didn’t eat chocolate.
Thank god the go to New York Writer’s Exchange prize didn’t have a practical alternative for self destructive people or I would have let that go, too. Almost in spite of myself then, I went to New York. Where the writers are.
The “prize” of winning a Writer’s Exchange grant from Poets and Writers is that you go from one state to another - in my case, Oregon to NYC. You get to choose writers you’d most like to meet and the Poets and Writers folks try very hard to arrange meetings. You get to give a reading at the National Poetry Club, you get to stay at the Gramercy Park Hotel and drink scotch into